Star and Marco vs Evil Book 1

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Eighteen months later...

From the back of Nachos, Marco surveyed the battlefield. They were in the Musty Mountains, where Mewmonsters had been found sheltering in the caves. A small allied army was forcing the Mewmonsters toward a valley where Hekapoo waited to portal them to another dimension.

When Lucitor Kingdom knights had opened Meteora's coffin prison in the Underworld soon after the ambush, it was empty. About five months later she reappeared, and in the time since, she had been employing hit-and-run-tactics. She would portal into a populated area, turn as many Mewmins as she could, then portal away, leaving the Mewmonsters behind.

As the number of Mewmonsters grew, the armies of the Butterfly Kingdom started to be overwhelmed. The armies lost a lot of soldiers to being transformed, and more importantly, lost experience that could not be replaced. After a month, the high command devised tactics to avoid direct contact with Meteora, but the damage had already been done. The armies promoted many new officers, including, out of necessity, young squires elevated to knighthood. One of the two corps in the field below Marco was under the command of Major General Dame Higgs. The armies lost more soldiers as the new officers learned, but the numbers transformed during combat had greatly diminished.

After that first month, Meteora's attacks seemed to become random and infrequent. It was not clear what her strategy was, but her army of Mewmonsters continued to grow as the number of Mewmins diminished.

The size of the Mewmonster horde eventually became so large they could no longer avoid depredations on the Monster communities and allied kingdoms. The Johansen and Spiderbite Kingdoms, as Mewmin kingdoms, added half of their armies to the Butterfly armies, while retaining the other half within their respective territories for defense. The non-Mewmin kingdoms retained the bulk of their armies to defend against encroaching Mewmonsters, sending only token forces to the Butterfly Kingdom.

Non-Mewmins were vulnerable to Meteora's life-force draining magic, but out of necessity Moon had found a way to restore the casualties without taking them to the Magic Sanctuary, or even needing her actual presence. She was able to infuse inanimate objects with the amount and type of magic necessary to reverse the effects. Every non-Mewmin soldier carried one of these objects, like a human deathly allergic to bee stings carried epinephrine, which discharged its magic automatically when a drained soldier was far enough from Meteora to not be drained twice.

Given the lessening of the danger Meteora posed to non-Mewmins, Marco thought it made more sense militarily to keep Mewmins as far from Meteora as possible, since turning Mewmins was the only way she had to increase the size of her army. The leaders of the various kingdoms did not agree, including the Lucitor Kingdom, where Tom, as Crown Prince, was second in command of the kingdom's armies. Marco didn't really blame them much for their reluctance, though ... while the Mewmonsters concentrated on the capture, rather than killing, of Mewmins so they could be transformed, they had no compunction against using teeth and claws on non-Mewmins. Nonetheless, Marco was worried they were trading smaller casualties now for catastrophic casualties later.

While the Mewmonsters avoided causing casualties, so, too, did the allied armies. The preference was to capture, rather than injure or kill, in the hope that a way to reverse the transformation would be discovered. While searching for empty, but habitable, dimensions to hold captured Mewmonsters, Queen Moon found the Monsters that had left Mewni. While the Mewmonsters almost never harmed Monsters directly, they were still devastating Monster food crops and animals. Moon convinced the Monsters to return to help their own kind, and now formed the backbone of a Monster corps under the command of Major General Sir Yvgeny Bulgolyubov, better known as Buff Frog. Marco checked to make sure the Monster corps was still in place to prevent any Mewmonsters from escaping the targeted valley.